Metanexus Sophia. 12,302 Words.

“The purpose of this paper is to examine some specifically philosophical questions about the current debate in selected North American public schools about including what is commonly called “intelligent design” (ID) as part of the schools' official science curriculum. The issues I will raise focus around two broad questions: First, what is the logical status of the arguments for and against ID? Second, may the arguments presented for ID be considered “scientific”? My analysis will be grounded in two related but nonetheless distinct disciplines of intellectual history – the history of western philosophy and the history of modern western European science.”

Varieties of Design Arguments

By Norbert M. Samuelson

Introduction¹

The purpose of this paper is to examine some specifically philosophical questions about the current debate in selected North American public schools about including what is commonly called “intelligent design” (ID) as part of the schools’ official science curriculum. The issues I will raise focus around two broad questions: First, what is the logical status of the arguments for and against ID? Second, may the arguments presented for ID be considered “scientific”? My analysis will be grounded in two related but nonetheless distinct disciplines of intellectual history – the history of western philosophy and the history of modern western European science. Based on my historical analysis I will suggest some tentative answers to the two questions.

That the conclusions will only be tentative is a consequence of the methodology. So let me begin with a word about the methodology, why I have chosen it, and why conclusions cannot be more than tentative.

The first methodological consideration has to do with the use of the term “science” and the logic of truth claims within the sciences. There is no single definition of the term “science” that can be adequate for all uses of it by all so-called “scientists” at all times and in all places. This negative judgment seems to me to be inescapable even if we confine our description to modern (i.e., 17th century C.E. and beyond) western (i.e., what arises from all European civilization) culture. Minimally, the term “science” is subject matter dependent, so that what might count as a line between science and non-science in one field could not be drawn in a very different science in the same way. Claims that may logically count as “scientific” in one discipline would appear as mere opinions in a different discipline whose subject matter can yield a much higher probability in principle. Similarly, different epistemic possibilities for truth claims will also determine what kind of methodology is or is not “legitimate” in different sciences. There are, for example, significant differences between the epistemic level of methods used and truth claims made in any life science than there are in another kind of physical field such as chemistry or physics. These differences are equally present in comparing the life sciences with the so-called social sciences and the humanities. (Under “social science” I am thinking primarily but not exclusively of psychology, sociology, and anthropology; by “humanities” I am thinking primarily but not exclusively of philosophy, history, and religious studies.) In general the more complex with respect to elements to be considered and the more dynamic the relations between the elements are the lower the line of probability legitimately required for truth claims in separating what is considered to be “knowledge” as opposed to “reasoned opinion” and the less the forms of legitimate argumentation used resemble what logicians would call “demonstration” or “proof.”

The second methodological consideration has to do with the limited applicability of generalizations about what collections of people think and say. Sociologists and anthropologists are primarily concerned with the views of all members of a group irrespective of how the quality of those beliefs varies. In contrast philosophers and intellectual historians are primarily concerned only with the views of those members of a group whose views are most rigorous and/or most influential. “Most rigorous” is a judgment about how carefully the thinkers have worked out their views with respect to clarity and logical consequences as well as how informed the believers are of relevant evidence (which includes what other thinkers say and argue). Not surprisingly, given the different interests, the kinds of beliefs upon which philosophers and intellectual historians focus often represent the beliefs of very few people, even in the groups considered, while the kinds of beliefs upon which social scientists concentrate are more often than not far more confused and less thought out than they need be for evaluating the epistemic quality of the claims that are relevant to a given question. Hence, it is not surprising, for example, that the beliefs of most Jews about God (for or against) bear relatively little resemblance to Maimonides’ theology and that very little knowledge of philosophical methodology is needed to discredit the intelligibility of the former claims. Similarly, it would be misleading at least to use the philosophical theology of Thomas Aquinas to represent what most Roman Catholics believe, and conversely it would be unfair to judge the reasonableness of Roman Catholic faith on a survey of the religious belief of most people who regularly attend a mass in (for example) south Phillie or the Westside of Chicago.

Philosophers of religion are mostly concerned with the epistemic quality of religious beliefs, hence the beliefs they discuss rarely reflect at a realistic level what most religious people believe, and that deficiency is proper. Similarly, in this paper I will look at what in my opinion are the best statements of ID and towards that end it makes no difference what other advocates of ID think or say, irrespective of the institutions they represent. Similarly, when I consider positions on Darwinian evolution, I am solely concerned with positions that I would judge to be logically and coherently the best, irrespective of what other advocates of Darwinian evolution claim, be they politicians in governments, or teachers of science in public schools, or professors of life sciences in western universities.

How then are we to decide on what is best? That question has already been given an initial answer. I will select what I consider to be logically the best and politically the most influential views. However, it is rarely the case that what is best is the most influential. Furthermore, there are many different ways to be the best, different ways to be influential, and rarely is a single view by a single believer the best in every respect and the most influential in every way. How then should I choose between multiple bests? The solution – at least for me—is not to blend the different voices together and present them as a single position. In general, the positions taken by good thinkers are distorted when they are removed from their literary and historical frameworks, and this is a kind of distortion that I wish to avoid. Hence, for each of the two major positions to be considered in this essay I will focus on the thought of a single thinker in full recognition that by doing so I will be ignoring other relevant thinkers who in important ways make different sorts of claims. I am willing to defend my choices even though I recognize that in making them I render my conclusions to be only tentative, for it may well be the case that on reconsideration in terms of different thinkers I might alter my conclusions.

In this paper I will focus on the presentation of intelligent design by Michael Behe in Darwin’s Black Box². His argument rests on certain scientific claims he makes. I will accept them at face value, i.e., I assume that the presented generalizations are stated correctly and are based on accepted methods of research in biology. (I, trained in philosophy, cannot in this respect function as a judge.) Instead my interest in the book is limited to the consequences about philosophical-theological topics based on the stated science. More specifically, I am concerned with the logical quality of his claimed trans-scientific conclusions and with the implications of the public debate of his position for defining science. For the logical issue again, for the same kinds of methodological reasons given above, I will turn to a single primary source – Richard M. Gale’s On the Nature and Existence of God³.

Next I will consider the claims of a now standard interpretation of Darwinian evolution as it is stated and defended by Richard Dawkins in The Blind Watchmaker.⁴ Then I will conclude this paper with some personal reflections on the nature of science as it emerges from the Behe-Dawkins debate out of a peculiarly historical perspective, which grows out of my current studies in the history of science. In this case the focus for comparison will be on the well-documented scholarly puzzle of Newton’s denial of hypothetical-deductive logic in his final reflections on his work as a theoretical physicist in his Principia.⁵

I. Is Intelligent Design (ID) a good argument?

A. Michael Behe’s Argument for Intelligent Design

Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box is no more a work of biology than is Dawkin’s The Blind Matchmaker.⁶ Rather, both books are works by recognized scientists⁷ about the implications of their knowledge of current scientific practice for future endeavors in science and for the relevance of science to culture in general. As such both books are informed studies in intellectual history and should be treated as such.

Behe’s book is a sustained argument for biology to adopt what he calls “intelligent design” over what he believes to be Darwin’s interpretation of evolution, which Behe affirms to be the dominant understanding of evolution today in the life sciences.⁸ Stated in its simplest terms, Behe points to four specific kinds of examples in molecular biology that exhibit what Behe calls “irreducible complexity.” He then argues that ID offers a better explanation of these and all other examples of irreducible complexity than can Darwinian evolution. The four examples are presented in chapters three through six. The argument about them is presented in chapters eight through ten.

Behe’s first example is of a structure called “cilium” which consists of a fusion of rods (called “tubules”) that are made up of proteins. These fused protein compounds attach to simple cells (for example, sperm), and enable the cells to move in the liquid (for example, semen) that fills their more complex host. Behe notes that the cilia function like the oars of a boat (59). On the analogy the cilia are the oars for the sperms (cells) moving in the semen sea within the universe of male and female reproductive organs.

The point of his cilium/oar analogy is explicitly stated on pg. 57. The reproductive systems of which Cilia play a part function as “(m)echanical examples of swimming systems” which are intelligible solely when seen as parts of such a system. Behe then asserts a second order analogy to explain the cilium function as “swimming.” He now compares the oar that is analogous to the cilium to a “mousetrap,” and then comments that a mousetrap without a spring is “a swimming system without a paddle, motor, or connector” without which the (reproductive/swimming) system would be “fatally incomplete.” (pg.57) Then Behe adds that “(b)ecause the swimming systems need several parts to work, they are irreducibly complex.” (pg.57) In other words, “irreducible complexity” is an attribute that characterizes a biological system that has multiple parts and the activity of at least some of those parts cannot be understood without reference to the system itself.

A second illustration, from American popular culture of the early 20th century, introduced to make his critical category of irreducible complexity more comprehensible, is the machines that the comic strip character, Rube Goldberg, would make, always operating in the most complex way imaginable to provide functions that always could have been provided in far more simple ways. In Behe’s words, it “is a system composed of several interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, where the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to cease functioning.” (pg. 76)

The comic book illustration of what Behe means by irreducible complexity shows that a biological system is to be defined by a set of multiple discrete actions that together produce an activity distinct from the more primary actions, and that each member of this set is necessary to the set, such that without each activity there could be no collective product. In addition, Behe seems to suggest (although he does not explicitly say so) that the individual discrete, more primary, functions also depend for their performance on the functioning of the whole. In other words, “irreducible complexity” is present as the defining characteristic of any complex entity that is “organic,” where for something to be organic means that it is composed of a set of simpler parts such that the well-being of the constituents are mutually dependent (for at least self-defined prosperity if not for existence and persistence) on each other and on their collective whole.⁹

Hence, any kind of complex entity that is organic will do equally with cilia to exemplify things that are irreducibly complex. Behe describes three other examples that he draws from his own research and teaching interests as a molecular biologist. However, as the above discussion of his first example should make clear, there is nothing of logical interest special about his examples from molecular biology. All organisms¹⁰ are such that the whole and each of its essential parts are mutually entailing with respect to both generation and preservation, such that if the parts were to exist independent of their participation in the whole they would be entirely different things than they are as defining constituents of the compound organism.¹¹

Chapter 8 begins Behe’s use of his category of irreducible complexity to argue for his central thesis, viz., that at least at the molecular level what I call “organic unity” can only be understood as a product of what Behe calls intelligent design. More accurately, the positive claim, viz., that the phenomena in question exhibit intelligence, is simply taken for granted. Instead Behe’s argumentation focuses in the related negative claim, viz. that no alternative system of explanation that modern biologists invoke can successfully explain organic unity. Behe grants at least in principle that given the modern history of the field of western biology, intelligent design may be invoked as a causal explanation only if the phenomena in question cannot be explained in any other way.

In fact Behe’s argument is subtler than I have stated. He summarizes his negative argument against what he considers to be Darwinian evolution on pg.176 where he says that he is not denying that “evolution, random mutation, and natural selection” do occur in nature. He does grant, for example, that we may effectively use any number of forms of “system analyses” from computer sciences, to model evolutionary processes. However, no system analysis itself can explain what “has caused complex systems to form.” In other words, Behe invokes intelligent design not as an alternative to the kinds of efficient causes (in Aristotle’s language) that explain the mechanism of evolution but as an inescapable appeal to explain the origins of these complex processes. Again to use Aristotelian language, Behe’s question is about why there exists the phenomena of organic life and not about how it occurs, for insofar as Behe the molecular biologist addresses how questions in this book, he gives the same kinds of answers that all biologists would give – mechanical explanations with reference to material entities as efficient movers.

At this point it should be clearer what the argument with evolutionary biologists is about. The question is not, can appeals be made, as modern Darwinian scientists and philosophers do, to principles such as “evolution, random mutation, and natural selection” to explain changes within the historical process of the evolution of living things. Clearly and explicitly Behe says that they can. The issue is, can these same Darwinian principles be employed to explain the genesis of the multiple interrelated and discrete processes of evolution itself, and this possibility Behe denies.

What should be clear by now is that Behe is not really talking about the kinds of concrete processes at all to which standard contemporary biologists confine their attention – viz., processes like (in Aristotelian terms) genesis and corruption, or health and sickness. Rather, Behe is concerned with the broader questions of the origins of the universe of living things themselves, viz., of the creation of the earth. And these questions have traditionally been a subject matter more appropriate to philosophers than biologists.

Of course, there is ample precedence for scientists to discuss these kinds of philosophical questions with specific reference to science. But there is something distinctive about the way that Behe raises them. First, he presents them as legitimate questions within the domain of the discipline of biology. Second, he raises the issue of creation and (by implication only) a creator with reference to biology.¹²

I will reserve the question of the legitimacy of discussing the possibility of a creator within science itself to the final section of this paper, and the question of the general legitimacy of design arguments such as those that Behe has presented to the next section. Here, however, before I conclude this first section of the paper that deals directly with Behe’s claims, I do want to make one qualification on what I have said that is important to understanding Behe’s argumentation in Darwin’s Black Box.

As I noted above in the previous footnote, it is not entirely accurate to say that questions about design arguments from the data of the sciences have arisen in the past exclusively from the more physical sciences. There are many notable exceptions to this generalization (which, like most generalizations, is only true generally). For our purposes the most notable exception is the theological biology of William Paley. It is his arguments for the necessity of intelligent design in biology that occupy much of the attention of both Dawkins and Behe. Let me therefore here say a word about Paley, especially with reference to the theological consequences he draws from his study of the mechanics of human vision.¹³

It is interesting that Dawkins, no less than Behe, speaks well of the writings of William Paley. It is true that the “creationism” of Paley heads the list of Dawkin’s so-called “doomed rivals” (pg. 288), but the list is for Dawkins composed of serious biologists. It includes not only Chevalier de Lamarck and T. D. Lysenko¹⁴ but also Stephen Jay Gould, Niles Eldredge, the distinguished early twentieth century founders of mutationism (Hugo de Vries and William Bateson), the “inventor” of the term “gene” (Wilhelm Johannsen) and the discoverer of the chromosome theory of heredity (Thomas Hunt Morgan), all of whom are major scientists and most influential figures in the history of Genetics. Let just one quote suffice for the value that Dawkins attributes to Paley.

Dawkins presents a brief history of the use of design arguments from the time of the ancient Greeks up to the time of Paley just before the ascent of Darwin. About Paley Dawkins says the following:

Compared with that of the Greeks, Paley’s argument is much improved. Although in Natural Theology he gives many poor examples of design (akin to Diogenes and Socrates), he also frequently hits the nail on the head. Among other things Paley writes about discrete systems such as muscles, bones, and mammary glands, that he believes would cease to function if one of several components were missing. This is the essence of the design argument. However, it must be emphasized for the modern reader that, even at his best, Paley was talking about biological black boxes: systems larger than a cell. Paley’s example of a watch, in contrast, is excellent because the watch was not a black box, its components and their roles were known. (pg. 212)

A reader cannot help but think that Behe had Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker in mind when he wrote his book, and this passage specifically in mind when he entitled his book, Darwin’s Black Box, for Behe presents Darwin in precisely the same way that Dawkins presented Paley. To paraphrase Behe, Darwin was a great scientist, but there was much about biology he could not know at the time that he wrote and that is why he thought he could explain evolution without intelligent design, for all of Behe’s claims about design turn on phenomena beyond the veil of the knowable in Darwin’s world of pre-genetic, pre-molecular biology.

Taking Dawkin’s praise of Paley’s watchmaker analogy, Behe turns it against Dawkins. As Behe says, Paley’s watch reference “is precisely correct – no one would deny that if you found a watch you would immediately, and with certainty, conclude that it was designed.” (pg. 215)

Clearly Behe marks himself here as a disciple of Paley, and that what he presents in Darwin’s Black Box is an update of Paley’s use of the argument from design for the existence of God. It is now time to look at how such arguments fair in modern studies in the philosophy of religion.

As long as human beings have tried to exhibit the existence of God through language they have used some version of the argument from design. Maimonides, who himself lived in the twelfth century, attributed the origin of the argument to the first generations of human civilization to arise after the expulsion from the Garden of Eden¹⁵. However, the argument was used to identify the wrong entity as God and, by so doing the development of the design argument is in part responsible for the rise of idolatry.¹⁶

More specifically, Maimonides speaks of an early civilization called “the Sabians” who developed the art of agriculture and used that experience to establish the worship of deities. They argued that just as a garden exhibits the order that was imposed upon the land by the gardener, so the universe exhibits an orderliness that suggests the existence of a deity who ordered it. However, the argument cannot establish just who is the order-er, so that, left to their own intellectual devices, lacking any direct revelation from God himself, the Sabian men of wisdom falsely concluded that the “gardeners” of the structured universe must have been the stars. Idolatry begins, therefore, from a misidentification, based on insufficient data, which the creators, correctly inferred through the use of analogy to exist, and properly judged to be worthy of praise, are the “celestial bodies.”

The problem, correctly identified by Maimonides himself, is that nothing can rationally be demonstrated by the use of analogy. Analogy is a tool of rhetoric, a strategy for using language in a way that will be persuasive to the listeners. It has nothing to do with logic, which presents strategies by which what we know by other means (such as direct experience or reliable testimony from qualified witnesses) can be extended (by valid inferences) to yield new knowledge.

In general, while the classical rabbinic philosophers believed that God’s existence, unity, and oneness could be rationally demonstrated without an appeal to revelation, they never considered any form of design argument to be logically compelling. Furthermore, many Christian scholastic philosophers, notably Thomas Aquinas, agreed with Maimonides and followed his example. However, presumably by the seventeenth century there existed, at least among the British Christian theologians, thinkers who did believe in the logical value of a design argument, for David Hume, in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, felt it necessary to demonstrate the limitation in this form of argument.

In general, for the most part philosophical theologians, both Jewish and Christian, continental and English-speaking, have not employed the argument for design to establish the existence of God. However, there are notable exceptions to this judgment, one of whom is William Paley. Yet I know of few major Christian and of no Jewish philosopher who so argues. However, the argument has reappeared in more recent times as a form of argument not for the existence but for the non-existence of God.

A recent PhD. Dissertation written by my student Michael Valle (completed in 2004) presents a rigorous and thorough logical analysis of this new kind of philosophical design argument that is based on post-Holocaust invocations of a principle called “the hiddeness of God.” The better logical forms of these arguments for God’s non-existence root themselves in actual examples of unprovoked suffering of children. These arguments belong more generally to a class of 20th century, English language arguments for the non-existence of God that are called “the deductive argument from evil.” Richard Gale presents a systematic and rigorous discussion of them in chapter 4 of his On the Nature and Existence of God.

At its most general level the argument claims that if by God we mean an entity of unlimited power and goodness, then God’s existence entails that evil does not exist, but since evil does exist, this deity necessarily does not. The most influential version of it was constructed by J.L. Mackie in 1955.¹⁷ We will not consider here the details of his argument, but there are a couple of features worth pointing out.

First, Mackie draws a distinction between existential and attributive uses of the terms “omnipotent” and “wholly good” and emphasizes that in his argument the predications are to be understood existentially. It is an important distinction because it saves him (at least initially) from the charge of theological ignorance of the established tradition from Maimonides through Aquinas that it is in principle impossible to make univocal affirmative statements about a creator whose existence is necessary in a language that builds semantically on a base of empirical experience whose range is limited to speech about inherently contingent creatures and created events.

Second, the claim that God is omnipotent entails (what Gale calls “quasi-logical rules”) that an omnibenevolent being (i.e., a being who is perfect in both power and goodness) eliminates or prevents every evil that he is capable of eliminating or preventing and there are no limits on what he can do. Therefore, the recognized existence of any contingent evil, i.e. an evil that logically need not occur, demonstrates this God’s non-existence. The main line of defense against the argument is to demonstrate that in fact (if not in principle) there can occur no contingent events that on final analysis are evil or that no unredeemable evil in this universe is contingent. Defenses so structured logically are called “free will defenses.” Of them the most influential in English-language academic circles of the study of the philosophy of religion is the version stated by Alvin Plantinga in his 1967 book, God and Other Minds.¹⁸

We will not here consider the logical details of Plantinga’s argument and we will restrict ourselves only to comments on his general strategy. There are two critical points that I want to emphasize. The first is that Plantinga must defend the claim that it is logically possible that God is contingently unable to create free persons who always do what is right. The second is that his defense necessitates that he must in some way modify what it means to claim that God is omnibenevolent.

Again we will not go through the details of any of these logical moves. For example, in one of several versions of Plantinga’s argument he suggests that what it means to say that someone is “free” is that he is “unfettered,” which amounts to a claim that the person choosing to do good or evil is not in any sense “brain-washed” to make his choice. In other words, human beings in general do not have, to use a biblical expression, their “hearts hardened” as God in Exodus hardens the heart of Pharoah so that he will not be free to give the children of Israel permission to leave Egypt. Still, Gale, in his analysis, rightly concludes that this move in no way helps Plantinga to save his argument, so that the free will defense cannot overcome the force of at least a revised version of his deductive argument from evil.

So much for what Gale himself says about this argument, most of which I accept as correct. However, I would want to add (and defend) the following evaluation of the discussion. Mackie’s argument for God’s non-existence on final analysis has neither more nor less logical force than do any of the earlier philosophical design arguments for God existence. Logically both the “defense of God arguments” (viz., the free will defense) and all of the versions of the deductive argument from evil suffer from the same weaknesses. First, they are arguments by analogy, which as such can only be considered rhetorical and never demonstrative arguments. Second, all of these arguments commit the fatal theological flaw of claiming that there is some way in which we as creatures can formulate affirmative, univocal statements about God. In other words, Maimonides’ arguments for negative theology remain valid,¹⁹ and Mackie’s claimed distinction between existential and attributive statements about God does not overcome Maimonides’ conclusions. There are ways that we as human beings can talk about God, but any affirmations of God that can be expressed in propositional form, that are to be understood as literal speech, and which purport to provide any positive knowledge of God, are simply bad theology if not worse.

One final historical note on my conclusion: It has been the case that since the seventeenth century there have been some philosophers who have felt free to make univocal positive statements about God despite their knowledge of Aquinas’ account of divine attributes. Descartes in particular is notable. It is not that he was ignorant of scholastic philosophy. Clearly he was not. However, he did believe that Aristotelianism could no more provide a foundation for questions of theology and metaphysics than it could continue to be the basis for discussions of mathematics and physics. In fact he had hoped that his Principles of Philosophy would become the new textbook in Roman Catholic departments of philosophy to replace their early modern Aristotelian primers as the instrument by which the Church academy would educate future citizens as both good scientists and good Catholics. So, clearly Descartes thought that the new logic drawn from the new, post-Gassendi natural philosophy, would allow, which the old Aristotelian philosophy did not, literal speech about what God both does and thinks.

Whatever it was that Descartes had in mind seems to me to border on delusion. Descartes and those who followed in his footsteps through the next two centuries had a confidence in the power of human reason and science that we, post the two great European wars, can no longer share. We are of historical necessity far more humble about the powers that we can grant to a purely human intellect, irrespective of the power claims for our new technology. So, arguments for and against the existence of God that presuppose that we can actually know something with clarity about the will of God – as creator, revealer, or redeemer – are necessarily defective. This judgment applies to the modern philosophical demonstrations that God does not exist no less than to even the sophisticated design arguments of scientists such as William Paley and Michael Behe.

So much for my summary and analysis of technical arguments from design by contemporary philosophers of religion. I now want to use the above analysis of philosophical design arguments against God’s existence to reflect on Richard Dawkin’s arguments against ID in his The Blind Watchmaker.²⁰

I will summarize Dawkin’s argument for a standard view of Darwinian evolution and conclude that it is a variant on the deductive argument against the existence of God that we outlined above, and that as such its logical value is the same as all design arguments – rhetorical appeals to persuade listeners to adopt certain beliefs rather than logical demonstrations of truth. However, note that what I say Dawkins is doing in The Blind Watchmaker is not exactly the same of what he thinks he is doing. As he states clearly in the introduction of his book, Dawkins presents a sustained argument for his claim that the “Darwinian world-view … could in principle solve the mystery of our existence” (xiv). Note that the claim does not look like a normal scientific claim. It is about a “world-view”, its purpose is to “solve the mystery of our existence”, and that claim is presented only as a possibility. It in effect looks something like the kind of statement one would expect from a contemporary, English-language theologian, viz. a claim for reasonable belief rather than knowledge about a most general outlook or point of view about the nature and value of absolutely everything.

What Dawkin’s worldview claims are that “non-random reproduction, where there is hereditary variation, has consequences far-reaching if there is time for them to be cumulative.” (Pg. xv) Dawkin’s worldview is a fairly standard interpretation of Darwinian evolution, which, as such, is not the only reasonable view about evolution that contemporary evolutionary biologists affirm. Much of the book is directed against these alternative interpretations. We will simply call them “non-standard” or “variant” views. Dawkins himself calls them his “doomed rivals” (title of chapter 11). For our purposes the most important variants are the “mutationists”, who affirm against the standard view random reproduction, and the “punctuationists”, who claim that evolutionary change occurs in discrete rather than continuous steps. Mutationism raises the problem of the relationship between cause, will, and chance in accounting for events.²¹ As we will see, Dawkins and Behe have significantly different views about this philosophical question that are never articulated, and this omission is at the heart of why the dispute between their positions is confused. Similarly, punctuationism raises interesting questions about the conception of the nature of time in evolutionary biology that lie at the heart of what seems to me to be a confusion about the physical concepts of a phenomena being discrete or continuous.²²

Dawkin’s actual argument for his position is brief, since most of the book is given to responses to his rivals. In chapter one Dawkins presents a philosophical argument against the thesis of design in the domain over which biology rules. (He wisely sets aside any consideration of the related issues about design in the domain of physical cosmology.) The issue about design has to do with how we can explain biological complexity, where “complexity” is defined as what is statistically improbable in any direction not specified with hindsight. Dawkins tells us that by a “complex thing” he means something that has “many parts” which are “of more than one kind” (pg. 6), and these parts “are arranged in a way that is unlikely to have arisen by chance alone.” (pg. 7) In other words complex phenomena are phenomena that that exhibit the peculiar characteristic of being statistically-improbable-in-a-direction-specified-without-hindsight. They seem intelligible only after we see what they have become, but were we to look at their earlier stages there would be no way to predict the direction in which they would develop. Defenders of design maintain that design by a designer is the most reasonable way to account for the evolution, while Dawkins himself argues that a more plausible explanation, at least with respect to the standard assumptions that modern science makes about what counts as an “explanation”²³ of any phenomena, is that each step of the process is accumulative and no step is discrete. This development is guided by the principle of natural selection whose direction is towards the non-random survival of the species. In chapter 2 Dawkins describes bat sonar as an example of how an organism can exhibit complex design without foresight, but nonetheless can be explained without any reference to intelligence. In chapter 3 Dawkins introduces an example of a nine dimensional computer program in order to illustrate how a sequence of cumulative steps can be directed by non-random selection without any consideration of intelligent design.²⁴ Finally, in chapter 4, Darwin briefly discusses a whole variety of phenomena that some of his rivals (notably, Francis Hitching and Richard Goldsmith) introduced to falsify the standard theory’s claim that evolution must be gradual. The cases involve the eyes of the Nautilus mollusk, the chemical defenses of the bombardier beetle, the evolution of wings, and the body structure of halibut.

Much of Dawkins’ discussion in his argument depends on how accurate is his description of the biological data in question, and I do not have adequate training to engage in this level of the discussion, either with Dawkins or with any of his rivals. Rather, I will accept what he says about the biology, and I will focus solely on the logical issues in the argument he builds against design from his scientific data.²⁵

Dawkins sets forth four distinct lines of defense for his standard Darwinian evolution thesis. The first three are specific to particular variant views and the fourth is a general claim about the superiority of his view over all others. First is an argument for an expanded notion of what time means in biology against the punctuationists (pp. 162-163). Second²⁶ is an argument against appeal to chance in biology that is directed against the mutationists. Third²⁷ is an argument against invoking purpose or design in biology that focuses on the adoption of William Paley’s form of argument by the British cleric Hugh Montefiore. Fourth is a general argument for the logical advantages of the standard view over mutationism in particular that applies with equal force against all of the noted rivals (pp. 311-312). In this paper we will limit ourselves to examine only two of these defenses – Dawkins’ argument about the nature of time in reply to the punctuationists, and his argument against chance in his reply to the mutationists.

The basic empirical evidence for the position of the punctuationists is that their thesis makes intelligible, which the standard view does not, why the fossil record shows that there are long periods of time over which there is little or no significant species change which are followed by relatively short periods of time during which considerable change takes place. Hence, the geometric expression of evolution is best understood as a step function and not as the kind of continuous change that the standard theory requires.

Dawkin’s central defense against this argument is a most interesting definition of time. He says in effect that time is not something fixed. Rather it is relative to the parameters of the people using time to measure change. Our normal standards for time duration are determined by the way our human brains evolved to solve the normal problems of survival that we must face in nature where we hunt and are hunted by other kinds of animals. However, the parameters of time change on the planet earth, as they are in the cosmos, is radically different, so that what would seem like a long period time given the time frame of human activity is only a moment (in fact is functionally continuous) given the time frame for change in the universe as well as for the planet earth as a whole.²⁸

What is interesting here, at least from a philosophical perspective, is that Dawkins appears to be trapped into a conception of time that is standard in analytic English language philosophy that makes impossible his commitment to evolution as gradual, which his standard model requires. He could reject the standard notion of what gradual means and keep the rest of his theory. He could argue, for example, that all time consists of discrete moments, and that some changes occur so quickly that the change seems to be (but really is not) continuous.²⁹ However, then there is no significant difference between his standard position of continuous evolutionary change and the variant theory of people like Gould.³⁰ In this (and other) passages where Dawkins insists that the disagreement is substantive, he adopts what is from an English-American perspective a radical interpretation of the nature of time.

Worst of all, Dawkins’ implicit conception of time here is especially characteristic of post modernist continental understanding of time. This essay is not the right place to develop what is this alternative conception of time. My purpose here is only to call attention to the anomaly. Let just one example suffice of a continental understanding of time that surprisingly is coherent with Dawkins’s claim in this book: Franz Rosenzweig – an early twentieth century German Jewish romantic philosopher and Jewish theologian – wrote to his beloved Grittli Rosenstock-Huessey that time “cannot be measured by years but by real people” which means that time is “eminently personal, or even better: interpersonal and intergenerational.”³¹ As the Rosenzweig text illustrates, Dawkins’ understanding of time here places him more in a tradition of Husserl and Heidegger than it does in (I’m sure) his preferred tradition of Russell and Ayer.

In chapter 3 Dawkins provides a number of examples of development of complexity where each step is made relative to a prior step. In all of these cases the initial step but only the first step of the process is a chance event. Each subsequent step is, in Dawkin’s own words, “directed” by a non-random principle of survival. In other words, except for the initial action that occurs by chance, everything else happens for a cause and the principle of causation is natural selection and/or survival of the fittest.³²

From a logical perspective an event may be determined or undetermined, and if it is determined it may be so by an intentional or an unintentional agency. Hence we may talk about an event occurring by chance, by design, or by causal necessity or by any combination of these principles. Dawkins seems to want to say that whereas people whom he identifies as “creationists” want to claim that design is involved in all of biology and mutationists want to claim that all events occur by chance, Dawkins wants to claim that biological events occur from a combination of chance and causal necessity, where the initial event in an evolutionary chain is a chance event but each subsequent event is causally determined.

As stated by Dawkins, the modal state of an evolutionary process is far too vague to be helpful. Even granting, as Dawkins insists, that to explain something only means to show how it works (pg. 11), so far Dawkins’ account hardly looks like an explanation at all. Consider an evolutionary process m1-m20. Presumably the initial state m1 was a chance event.³³ For example it could be a change brought about through a genetic mutation. But every other event in the chain is causally determined. Hence, while the initial event is modally contingent, every subsequent event is conditionally necessary (i.e., it follows necessarily from the initial event). However, the final event in the process (m20) may itself through a genetic accident start another causal chain, n1-n20. Now presumably n1 is a contingent event but m20 is conditionally necessary and m20 and n1 are the same event. Perhaps the only really contingent event was the big bang itself. However, if that is the case, then every event subsequent to the origin of the universe is causally determined, including the events in biology, but our data for evolution suggests otherwise. Again, a mutationist position seems far more in keeping with the evidence of genetic evolution, where chains of reactions are understood to be essentially contingent, i.e., matters of chance, than is Dawkin’s far more causal (in a classical seventeenth century use of the term) standard Darwinian approach to evolution. The issue about logic here is important, because it is at the heart of the strategy of exponents of some form of ID.

The French mathematician, natural philosopher, and priest Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655) revived the atomism of the Hellenic Stoics Democritus and Epicurus as a model for the way that the modern natural philosopher should understand the physical universe. To a large extent subsequent French natural philosophers adopted Gassendi’s teachings, which became the model for the way that at least English speaking philosophers understood the distinctive nature of modern science. On this view the universe is ultimately composed of extremely small, indivisible entities that are in every respect the same except for their location in time and space. Furthermore, because they are essentially the same there can be no essential differences between them. They are unique only in location in space-time and since this difference is not a consequence of their natures, individuality is an accident. What is ultimately true of the fundamental components of reality therefore must be true of all compounds formed from them. All so called causation can be nothing more than an assertion about observed constant conjunction of events all of which are in themselves inherently contingent. At least this is what the Scottish enlightenment philosopher David Hume argued in the eighteenth century and Hume’s argument still dominates in English language speaking departments of philosophy.

Behe’s argument assumes that Gassendi’s model for science holds true of biology no less than of physics. Scientific laws are based on observed regularities, but these regularities must ultimately be chance events given the presupposed “atomic” nature of the physical universe. Hence, the universe being the sort of place it is, complexity cannot arise through causes. To claim otherwise would be to return (God forbid) to some form of Aristotelian conception of science of which another seventeenth century French mathematician and natural philosopher, Rene Descartes proposed in the name of “Rationalism.” Now, given that modern science presupposes a universe that lacks causal necessities, events occur ultimately either by chance or by design, and given considerable complexity in a physical or a biological state, it is reasonable to advocate design over accident, which is what Behe does.

What at this point should be obvious is that Behe’s intelligent design and Dawkins’ standard Darwinian evolution theses are talking past each other. Behe assumes that modern science, including biology, is committed to an atomic cosmology in which all connections are contingent, and he is driven from that assumption, in the light of the evidence of the phenomena of organic life, to conclude that there is design in the natural world. Conversely, Dawkins assumes that modern science, especially biology, is committed to a mechanical (here meaning non-teleological) cosmology and in the light of the same kind of evidence of organic life is forced to conclude that there exists in physical reality causal principles such as natural selection. Note that both thinkers are engaged, at least in the books under consideration, in doing philosophy and the ultimate difference between them is an understanding of what is the nature of modern science. For Behe the defining feature of modern science is its commitment to material atomism, and for Dawkins the defining feature of modern science is its commitment to mechanistic explanations.

This concludes my analysis of the logic of Behe’s argument for intelligent design in his Darwin’s Black Box. The consideration of the logic has led us from Behe’s book itself to a consideration of general arguments from design both for and against the existence of God as they are analyzed in Richard Gale’s On the Nature of God, and Richard Dawkins’ argument for non-random, gradual evolution directed by natural selection in his The Blind Watchmaker. We reached three general conclusions. First, that both the Dawkins and the Behe arguments are simply applications to biology from philosophical arguments from design, either for (in Behe’s case) or against (in Dawkins’ case) the existence of God. Two, all forms of arguments from design, both in the past as well as in the present, function as rhetorical means of persuasion and should never be confused with logical forms for demonstration. Third, at the heart of the dispute between Dawkins and Behe is confusion about the nature of modern science. It is this third conclusion that leads us to the second part of this paper. Is intelligent design science? The question presupposes that we know what science is, and it is this presupposition that I want to investigate now. The first part was an exercise in philosophy. The second part will be an exercise in intellectual history.

As in the first part I would like to focus attention on a single text rather than speak generally in the abstract about the question. I will use the concrete case to exemplify certain general claims about the nature of modern science rather than form some general judgments and apply them to individual cases. As we shall see my preferred method of inquiry says something about what I think makes modern science both modern and science. The text consists of two specific judgments by Isaac Newton about the claimed role of hypotheses in his understanding of “experimental philosophy” at the end of his Principia.

Newton knew that other philosophers – primarily on the continent and notably Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz – would be critical of his conception of gravity. At least from the perspective of the still traditional Aristotelian physics that persisted in European university instruction even in the 17th century, Newton’s understanding of the universe involved two scandals both connected with gravity. One, it presupposed the existence of a vacuum between celestial bodies. Two, it asserted that one body can move another body at a distance without physical contact between them. To avoid these unacceptable conclusions Descartes devised an elaborate theory of celestial vortices operating in a heavenly sea of ether to account for the same phenomena that motivated Newton to introduce the daringly unconventional notion of gravity. In anticipation of what his critics would say against him, Newton added the following “general scholium” to the end of his Principia.

I have underlined certain phrases for the sake of emphasis. Note first that Newton’s Principia uses gravity in order to explain certain sets of physical phenomena, and his explanations consist of descriptions rather than causes. In and of itself this definition of what he is doing radically distinguishes his and subsequent science from the Aristotelian science from which he and his intellectual peers departed. For Aristotle and the Aristotelians what it meant to explain something is to identify its causes. In contrast, the science in which Newton is engaged involves no causes and no causal principles whatsoever. Hence it is in Newton’s spirit that Dawkins asserts that what he means by explaining something is to describe “how it works” (pg. 11) The question is, does Behe’s thesis of ID function as an explanation in this sense or is it something more like an Aristotelian notion of explanation where to explain a phenomena is to list its causes, one of which is a final or teleological cause. In this context Behe’s ID is an example of an older Aristotelian conception of science in contrast to the kind of modern science that Newton’s Principia reflects and (in some respects) initiates.

The “force” of which Newton speaks is gravity. Just what exactly he thinks it is is not clear. By “force” Newton probably had in mind something more in keeping with how the term functions in alchemy. However, we today understand what he meant in more mathematical terms. It expresses a vector whose analysis is largely expressible in terms of the way we today understand differentiation and integration in calculus. Yet Newton’s calculus is not the same as this calculus, which perhaps is more representative of Leibniz than of Newton, which is the physics into which subsequent intellectuals translated Newton’s largely obscure (at least to me) terms of expression. Those transmitters of Newton’s physics lived mostly in the 18th century, were republican in their politics, and were French. As such they tended to be anglophiles, which means they tended to romanticize everything English in terms of how they as French republicans thought everything should be. In effect this is how they interpreted Newton, viz., as if his physics could be understood in line with their enlightenment ideal as purely mechanical. Yet, Newton affirms clearly and forcefully that his account has nothing to do with “mechanical causes.” In this sense they transformed Newton’s consciously anti-Cartesian and anti-mechanistic science into a mechanical philosophy that says what these intellectuals thought Descartes should have said in the light of the empirical “phenomena” of celestial dynamics.

The above description is the context in which Newton asserts his famous dictum³⁵ “Hypotheses non fingo.” It is his assertion, in anticipation of the attacks by his continental scientific opponents (his “doomed rivals” so-to-speak), that gravity cannot be understood in the old Aristotelian way as a natural philosophy that explains phenomena in terms of any of the four causes, including efficient or “mechanical” cause, but does something else that in terms of the history of natural philosophy is radically new. He calls the new philosophy “experimental.” Its explanatory principles are not “hypotheses … metaphysical or physical,” and they are not based on anything that is “occult” (such as alchemy?) or even mechanical (such as Cartesian physics?). Rather this new kind of philosophy asserts propositions that (so Newton claims) are “deduced” from phenomena and generalized by “induction.”

Newton’s bold proclamation that his philosophy is free of hypotheses produced considerable debate and forced Newton to make various methodological additions to subsequent editions of the Principia, none of which succeeded in setting to rest the questions about his methodology and none of which succeeded in making his affirmed method any clearer than it was at first.³⁶ Still, while it is not clear what he thought he was affirming, it is clear what he was rejecting. He was not endorsing any so-called “hypothetico-deductive” procedure in keeping with the French Cartesian tradition of mechanical philosophy, contrary to the way that subsequent generations of scientists and philosophers interpreted him.

Again, what constructively Newton thought he was doing remains to this day unclear. Whatever it was it is significantly different from what today we would call “science,” for our current use of the term in the English speaking world has evolved³⁷ into a 20th century positivist understanding of science that evolved out of a 19th century understanding of natural philosophy that itself evolved out of an 18th century continental reconstruction of Newton’s singular form of experimental philosophy in reaction against both the mechanistic philosophy of intellectuals like Descartes and Spinoza (whom Newton mistakenly assimilated together) and the university academic defenders of Aristotelianism.

What the example makes clear is that whatever “science” is it is not something fixed. Any definition offered of science at any point in time is only a picture of the collection of academic disciplines at that time. However, it is only a snapshot which, when taken, is already becoming something else. The kind of analysis here provided for the physics of Isaac Newton as “science” is no less true for the biology of Charles Darwin.³⁸ At first naturalists (who themselves evolve into biologists) were skeptical about Darwinian evolution for a variety of reasons, including many of the questions raised by creationists in the light of the Bible’s seemingly contrary claims about the origins of the earth. However those objections were in a relatively short amount of time set aside and Darwinian evolution took over as a standard view among naturalists. Still, as we have seen in discussing Dawkins, the empirical data itself raised problems not easy (or at least not obviously) coherent with Darwin’s thesis as he first presented it. Furthermore, Darwinian gradual evolution non-randomly directed by natural selection encountered similar philosophical problems to be considered “scientific” as we have seen in the case of Newton’s thesis of gravity in physics. For example, can a claim be considered scientific if it cannot be directly verified, and such verification is in principle impossible when dealing with historical data. Of course there are ways to answer such an objection, but all of them involve modifying our definition of what we mean by “science.” The point is that judgments of the value of claims about science cannot be founded upon any pre-conceived definition of science. Science should be about discovering truths, and how we conduct such discoveries depends on the questions we are asking. We may assume as a working hypothesis that for any question there is at least one way to go about answering it, but our minds must remain sufficiently flexible to consider new ways for new data. At least that is the lesson that I would suggest we draw from the history of science. What science was is not what it need become. Furthermore, to insist that the rules for evaluating science stand outside of science not only is a judgment that is not scientific but itself functions as an impediment to science.

Let me end this section of the paper with a quote by John Hedley Brooke that elegantly makes my point. With reference to the philosophical objections raised against Darwinian evolution at the end of the 19th century, Brooke says the following:³⁹

It was in the nature of a historical science that economy and coherence of explanation would have to take precedence over direct verification. Such a reply, however, exposed the hypothetico-deductive structure of Darwin’s science. … The difficulty here was one that the scientific community had partly brought on itself. So often in the past it had pretended to be following the Baconian method in which preconceived hypotheses were outlawed. It was a pretense that had helped in projecting images of scientific objectivity and of a community united by a common methodology. So facile an image had already been challenged. The Cambridge philosopher William Whewell had underlined the differences between the sciences in the fundamental ideas and methods on which they depended. But the earlier propaganda had been remarkably effective. The popular magazine Punch carried the following objection to Darwin’s Descent of man:

Endnotes

Professor Norbert M. Samuelson is the Harold and Jean Grossman Chair of Jewish Studies at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona. He is an internationally renowned scholar of Jewish philosophy, who is the author of over 200 articles, and the co-editor of three collected volumes of essays. He is the founder and secretary of the Academy of Jewish Philosophy and the secretary of the American Theological Society. Prior to assuming the newly-established Chair of Jewish Studies, Prof. Samuelson was a Professor of Religion for twenty three years at Temple University and for two years at the University of Virginia. He launched his academic career after serving as a Hillel Rabbi in Indiana University and Princeton University. Prof. Samuelson holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Indiana University (1970), Rabbinic Ordination from the Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion (1962), and a B.A. from Northwestern University (1957). Prof. Samuelson's scholarship focuses on Jewish philosophy and theology. He has written six books: Gersonides on God's Knowledge (1977), a critical edition and exposition of Abraham ibn Daud's Exalted Faith (1986) An Introduction to Modern Jewish Philosophy (1989), The First Seven Days: A Philosophical Commentary on the Creation of Genesis (1992) and Judaism and the Doctrine of Creation (1994); A Users' Guide to Franz Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption (1999). Prof. Samuelson has been active in the American Academy of Religion, the Association of Jewish Studies, the American Theological Society, and the American Philosophical Association.

©2006 Metanexus Institute

Published on 2006.3.31.